Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.
Interpretation
Empathy for others increases when we can easily envision their experiences and challenges.
This quote by Steven Pinker emphasizes the importance of empathy and moral consideration in human interactions. It suggests that when we can visualize what it is like to be in someone else's position, our understanding and compassion for their situation grows, prompting us to treat them with greater kindness and fairness. This ability to 'trade places' in imagination fosters a deeper connection and commitment to the well-being of others.
In practice
This quote could be used in speeches about social justice to encourage empathy.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
I was a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity. I didn't even know anymore why I was living.
Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.
Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.
The most striking contradiction of our civilization is the fundamental reverence for truth which we profess and the thorough-going disregard for it which we practice.
The fact that people die because of an AK-47 is not because of the designer, but because of politics.
"Natural" man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.
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